amen, and his verdict, thus repeated and confirmed, may go down to eternity. Here, too, as in the "Song of the Shirt," the effect is trebled by the outward levity of the strain. Light and gay the masquerade his grieved heart puts on; but its every flower, feather, and fringe shakes in the internal anguish as in a tempest. This one stanza (coldly praised by a recent writer in the "Edinburgh Review," whose heart and intellect seem to be alike extinct, but to us how unspeakably dear!) might perpetuate the name of Hood: "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver, But not the dark arch, Nor the black flowing river; After all this, we "have not the heart," as Lord Jeffrey used to say, to turn to his "Whims and Oddities," &c., at large. "Here lies one who spat more blood and made more puns than any man living," was his self-proposed epitaph. Whether punning was natural to him or not, we cannot tell. We fear that with him, as with most people, it was a bad habit, cherished into a necessity and a disease. Nothing could be more easily acquired than the power of punning, if, in Dr Johnson's language, one's mind were but to abandon itself to it. What poor creatures you meet, from whom puns come as easily as perspiration. If this was a disease in Hood, he turned it into a commodity." His innumerable puns, like the minnikin multitudes of Lilliput supplying the wants of the Man Mountain, fed, clothed, and paid his rent. This was more than Aram Dreams or Shirt Songs could have done, had he written them in scores. Some, we know, will, on the other hand, contend that his facility in punning was the outer form of his inner faculty of minute analogical perception that it was the same power at play-that the eye which, when earnestly and piercingly directed, can perceive delicate resemblances in things has only to be opened to see like words dancing into each other's embrace; and that this, and not the perverted taste of the age, accounts for Shakspere's puns; punning being but the game of football, by which he brought a great day's labour to a close. Be this as it may, Hood punned to live, and made many suspect that he lived to pun. This, however, was a mistake. For, apart from his serious pretensions as a poet, his puns swam in a sea of humour, farce, drollery, fun of every kind. Parody, caricature, quiz, innocent double entendre, mad exaggeration, laughter holding both his sides, sense turned awry, and downright, staring, slavering nonsense, were all to be found in his writings. Indeed, every species of wit and humour abounded, with, perhaps, two exceptions; the quiet, deep, ironical smile of Addison and the misanthropic grin of Swift (forming a stronger antithesis to a laugh than the blackest of frowns) were not in Hood. Each was peculiar to the single man whose face bore it, and shall probably re-appear no more. For Addison's matchless smile we may look and long in vain; and forbid that such a horrible distortion of the human face divine as Swift's grin (disowned for ever by the fine, chubby, kindly family of mirth!) should be witnessed again on earth! "Alas! poor Yorick. Where now thy squibs?—thy quiddities?-thy flashes that wont to set the table in a roar? Quite chopfallen?" The death of a man of mirth has to us a drearier significance than that of a more sombre spirit. He passes into the other world as into a region where his heart had been translated long before. To death, as to a nobler birth, had he looked forward; and when it comes his spirit readily and cheerfully yields to it, as one great thought in the soul submits to be displaced and darkened by a greater. To him death had lost its terrors, at the same time that life had lost its charms. But " can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides?"—is there wit any more than wisdom in the grave?-do puns there crackle?or do "Comic Annuals" there mark the still procession of the years? The death of a humorist, as the first serious epoch in his history, is a very sad event. In Hood's case, however, we have this consolation: a mere humorist he was not, but a sincere lover of his race a hearty friend to their freedom and welfare-a deep sympathiser with their sufferings and sorrows; and, if he did not to the full consecrate his high faculties to their service, surely his circumstances as much as himself were to blame. Writing, as we are, in Dundee, where he spent some of his early days, and which never ceased to possess associations of interest to his mind; and owing, as we do, to him a debt of much pleasure, and of some feelings higher still, we cannot but take leave of his writings with every sentiment of admiration and gratitude. H THOMAS MACAULAY. Our To attempt a new appraisement of the intellectual character of Thomas Macaulay, we are impelled by various motives. former notice of him* was short, hurried, and imperfect. Since * In our first "Gallery of Portraits." it was written, too, we have had an opportunity of seeing and hearing the man, which, as often happens in such cases, has given a more distinct and tangible shape to our views, as well as considerably modified them. Above all, the public attention has of late, owing to circumstances, been so strongly turned upon him, that we are tolerably sure of carrying it along with us in our present discussion. The two most popular of British authors are, at present, Charles Dickens and Thomas Macaulay. The supremacy of the former is verily one of the signs of the times. He has no massive or profound intellect—no lore superior to a schoolboy's-no vast or creative imagination-little philosophic insight, little power of serious writing, and little sympathy with either the subtler and profounder parts of man, or with the grander features of Nature (witness his description of Niagara-he would have painted the next pump better!); and yet, through his simplicity and sincerity, his boundless bonhommie, his fantastic humour, his sympathy with everyday life, and his absolute and unique dominion over every region of the Odd, he has obtained a popularity which Shakspere nor hardly Scott in their lifetime enjoyed. He is ruling over us like a Fairy King or Prince Prettyman-strong men as well as weak yielding to the glamour of his tiny rod. Louis XIV. walked so erect, and was so perfect in the management of his person, that people mistook his very size, and it was not discovered till after his death that he was a little, and not a large man. So many of the admirers of Dickens have been so dazzled by the elegance of his proportions, the fairy beauty of his features, the minute grace of his motions, and the small sweet smile which plays about his mouth, that they have imagined him to be a Scott, or even a Shakspere. To do him justice, he himself has seldom fallen into such an egregious mistake. He has seldom, if ever, sought to alter, by one octave, the note Nature gave him, and which is not that of an eagle, nor of a nightingale, nor of a lark, but of a happy, homely, gleesome "Cricket on the Hearth." Small almost as his own Tiny Tim, dressed in as dandyfied a style as his own Lord Frederick Verisoft, he is as full of the milk of human kindness as his own Brother Cheeryble; and we cannot but love the man who has first loved all human beings, who can own Newman Noggs as a brother, and can find something to respect in a Bob Sawyers, and something to pity in a Ralph Nickleby. Never was a monarch of popular literature less envied or more loved; and while rather wondering at the length of his reign over such a capricious domain as that of letters, and while fearlessly expressing our doubts as to his greatness or permanent dominion, we own that his sway has been that of gentleness of a wideminded and kindly man; and take this opportunity of wishing long life and prosperity to "Bonnie Prince Charlie." In a different region, and on a higher and haughtier seat, is Thomas Macaulay exalted. In general literature, as Dickens in fiction, is he held to be facile princeps. He is, besides, esteemed a rhetorician of a high class—a statesman of no ordinary calibre —a lyrical poet of much mark and likelihood—a scholar ripe and good-and, mounted on this high pedestal, he "has purposed in his heart to take another step," and to snatch from the hand of the Historic Muse one of her richest laurels. To one so gifted in the prodigality of Heaven, can we approach in any other attitude than that of prostration? or dare we hope for sympathy, while we proceed to make him the subject of free and fearless criticism? Before proceeding to consider his separate claims upon public admiration, we will sum up, in a few sentences, our impressions of his general character. He is a gifted, but not a great man. He is a rhetorician without being an orator. He is endowed with great powers of perception and acquisition, but with no power of origination. He has deep sympathies with genius, without possessing genius of the highest order itself. He is strong and broad, but not subtle or profound. He is not more destitute of original genius than he is of high principle and purpose. He has all common faculties developed in a large measure, and cultivated to an intense degree. What he wants is the gift that cannot be given the power that cannot be counterfeited-the wind that bloweth where it listeth-the vision, the joy, and the sorrow, with which no stranger intermeddleth-the "light which never was on sea or shore-the consecration and the poet's dream.” To such gifts, indeed, he scarcely pretends. To roll the raptures of poetry, without emulating its speciosa miracula—to write worthily of heroes, without aspiring to the heroic-to write history, without enacting it—to furnish to the utmost degree his own mind, without leading the minds of others one point farther than to the admiration of himself and of his idols, seems, after all, to have been the main object of his ambition, and has already been nearly satisfied. He has played the finite game of talent, and not the infinite game of genius. His goal has been the top of the mountain, and not the blue profound beyond; and on the point he has sought he may speedily be seen, relieved against the heights which he cannot reach—a marble fixture, exalted and motionless. Talent stretching itself out to attain the attitudes and exaltation of genius, is a pitiable and painful position, but it is not that of Macaulay. With piercing sagacity he has, from the first, discerned his proper intellectual powers, and sought, with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, to cultivate them." Macaulay the Lucky," he has been called; he ought rather to have been called Macaulay the Wise. With a rare combination of the arts of age and the fire of youth, the sagacity of the worlding and the enthusiasm of the scholar, he has sought self-development as his principal, if not only end. He is a gifted, but not a great man. He possesses all those ornaments, accomplishments, and even natural endowments, which the great man requires for the full emphasis and effect of his power (and which the greatest alone can entirely dispense with), but the power does not fill, possess, and shake the drapery. The lamps are lit in gorgeous effulgence; the shrine is modestly, yet magnificently, adorned; there is everything to tempt a god to descend; but the god descends not or, if he does, it is only Maia's son, the Eloquent, and not Jupiter, the Thunderer. The distinction between the merely gifted and the great is, we think, this the gifted adore greatness and the great; the great worship the infinite, the eternal, and the god-like. The gifted gaze at the moon-like reflections of the Divine-the great, with open face, look at its naked sun, and each look is the principle and prophecy of an action. He has profound sympathies with genius, without possessing genius of the highest order itself. Genius, indeed, is his intellectual god. It is (contrary to a common opinion) not genius that Thomas Carlyle worships. The word genius he seldom uses, in writing or in conversation, except in derision. We can conceive a savage cachinnation at the question, if he thought Cromwell or Danton a great genius. It is energy in earnest that he so much admires. With genius, as existing almost undiluted in the person of such men as Keats, he cannot away. It seems to him only a long swoon or St Vitus's dance. It is otherwise with Macaulay. If we trace him throughout all his writings, we will find him watching for genius with as much care and fondness as a lover uses in following the footsteps of his mistress. This, like a golden ray, has conducted him across all the wastes and wildernesses of history. It has brightened to his eye each musty page and worm-eaten volume. Each morning has he risen exulting to renew the search; and he is never half so eloquent as when dwelling on the achievements of genius, as sincerely and rapturously as if he were reciting his own. His sympathies are as wide as they are keen. Genius, whether thundering with Chatham in the House of Lords, or mending kettles and dreaming dreams with Bunyan in Elstowe-whether sitting in the saloons of Holland House with De Stael and Byron, or driven from men as on a new Nebuchadnezzar whirlwind, in the person of poor wandering Shelley-whether in Coleridge, "With soul as strong as a mountain river, Pouring out praise to the Almighty giver;" or in Voltaire shedding its withering smile across the universe, like the grin of death-whether singing in Milton's verse, or glit |